In order for companies to remain competitive, companies must always monitor their revenues, sales and costs and determine the basis for changes in these items from one period to another period. Companies generally maintain income statements which reflect the various sources of revenue in addition to the origins of various costs.
Generally, income statements are produced in a spreadsheet hard copy format in which corporate accountants must manually sift through the information to determine reasons for differences in revenue, costs or profit from one period to another period. However, this method of financial analysis is labor and time intensive and expensive to companies. Accordingly, a need has developed for an improved and automated method of analyzing financial data.